> "The creation of CSAM using AI is inherently harmful to children because the machine-learning models utilized by AI have been trained on datasets containing thousands of depictions of known CSAM victims," it says, "revictimizing these real children by using their likeness to generate AI CSAM images into perpetuity."
The word "inherently" there seems like a big stretch to me. I see how it could be harmful to them, but I also see an argument for how such AI generated material is a substitute for the actual CSAM. Has this actually been studied, or is it a taboo topic for policy research?
There's a legally challengable assertion there; "trained on CSAM images".
I imagine an AI image generation model could be readily trained on images of adult soldiers at war and images of children from instagram and then be used to generate imagery of children at war.
I have zero interest in defending exploitation of children, the assertion that children had to have been exploited in order to create images of children engaged in adult activities seems shaky. *
* FWiW I'm sure there are AI models out there that were trained on actual real world CSAM .. it's the implied neccessity that's being questioned here.
It is known that the LAION dataset underpinning foundation models like Stable Diffusion contained at least a few thousand instances of real-life CSAM at one point. I think you would be hard-pressed to prove that any model trained on internet scrapes definitively wasn't trained on any CSAM whatsoever.
> I think you would be hard-pressed to prove that any model trained on internet scrapes definitively wasn't trained on any CSAM whatsoever.
I'd be hard pressed to prove that you definitely hadn't killed anybody ever.
Legally if it's asserted that these images are criminal because they are the result of being the product of an LLM trained on sources that contained CSAM then the requirement would be to prove that assertion.
With text and speech you could prompt the model to exactly reproduce a Sarah Silverman monologue and assert that proves her content was used in the training set, etc.
Here the defense would ask the prosecution to demonstrate how to extract a copy of original CSAM.
But your point is well taken, it's likely most image generation programs of this nature have been fed at least one image that was borderline jailbait and likely at least one that was well below the line.
> Legally if it's asserted that these images are criminal because they are the result of being the product of an LLM trained on sources that contained CSAM then the requirement would be to prove that assertion.
Legally, possession of CSAM is against the law because there is an assumption that possession proves contribution to market demand, with an understanding that demand incentives production of supply, meaning there that with demand children will be harmed again to produce more content to satisfy the demand. In other words, the intent is to stop future harm. This is why people have been prosecuted for things like suggestive cartoons that have no real-life events behind them. It is not illegal on the grounds of past events. The actual abuse is illegal on its own standing.
The provenance of the imagery is irrelevant. What you need to prove is that your desire to have such imagery won't stimulate yourself or others to create new content with real people. If you could somehow prove that LLM content will satisfy all future thirst, problem solved! That would be world changing.
Framing it in that way is essentially a get out of jail free card - anyone caught with CSAM can claim it was AI generated by a "clean" model, and how would the prosecution ever be able to prove that it wasn't?
I get where you are coming from but it doesn't seem actionable in any way that doesn't effectively legalize CSAM possession, so I think courts will have no choice but to put the burden of proof on the accused. If you play with fire then you'd better have the receipts.
It is, but that's hardly unprecedented for this type of thing. In commercial porn the legal burden is on the producer to prove that their models were adults, not for prosecutors to prove that they were minors.
I think you'd be hard-pressed to prove that a few thousand images (out of over 5 billion in the case of that particular data set) had any meaningful effect on the final model capabilities.
> There's a legally challengable assertion there; "trained on CSAM images".
"Legally challengable" only in a pretty tenuous sense that's unlikely to ever haven any actual impact.
That'll be something that's recited as a legislative finding. It's not an element of the offense; nobody has to prove that "on this specific occasion the model was trained in this or that way".
It could theoretically have some impact on a challenge to the constitutionality of the law... but only under pretty unlikely circumstances. First you'd have to get past the presumption that the legislature can make any law it likes regardless of whether it's right about the facts (which, in the US, probably means you have to get courts to take the law under strict scrutiny, which they hate to do). Then you have to prove that that factual claim was actually a critical reason for passing the law, and not just a random aside. Then you have to prove that it's actually false, overcoming a presumption that the legislature properly studied the issue. Then maybe it matters.
I may have the exact structure of that a bit wrong, but that's the flavor of how these things play out.
My comment was in response to a portion of the comment above:
> because the machine-learning models utilized by AI have been trained on datasets containing thousands of depictions of known CSAM victims
I'd argue that CSAM imagery falls into two broad categories; actual real photographic image of actual real abuse and generated images (paintings, drawings, animations, etc) and all generated images are more or less equally bad.
There's a peer link in this larger thread ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_status_of_fictional_porn... ) that indicates at least two US citizen have been charged and sentenced for 20 and 40 years imprisonment each for the possession and distribution of "fictional" child abuse (animated and still japanese cartoon anime, etc).
So, in the wider world, it's a moot point whether these specific images came from training on actual abuse images or not, they depict abuse and that's legally sufficient in the US (apparently), further the same depictions could be generated with or without actual real abuse images and as equivilant images either way they'd be equally offensive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relationship_between_child_por... is a good starting link on this. When i last checked, there were maybe 5 studies total (imagine how hard it is to get those approved by the ethics committees), all of which found different results, some totally the opposite of each other.
Then again, it already seems clear that violent video games do not cause violence, and access to pornography does not increase sexual violence, so this case being the opposite would be unusual.
The word "revictimizing" seems like an even bigger stretch. Assuming the output images don't actually look like them personally (and they won't), how exactly are they more victimized than anybody else in the training data? Those other people's likenesses are also "being used to generate AI CSAM images into perpetuity"... in a sort of attenuated way that's hard to even find if you're not desperately trying to come up with something.
The cold fact is that people want to outlaw this stuff because they find it icky. Since they know it's not socially acceptable (quite yet) to say that, they tend to cast about wildly until they find something to say that sort of sounds like somebody is actually harmed. They don't think critically about it once they land on a "justification". You're not supposed to think critically about it either.
I always found these arguments to be contrived especially when it's already well-known that in the tradition of every Western government, there is no actual imperative for every crime to be linked directly to a victim. It's a far better argument to me, to suggest that the societal utility in using the material to identify and remove paedophiles before they have an actual victim far exceeds the utility of any sort of "freedom" to such material.
Benefiting from illegal acts is also a crime, even if indirect. Like getting a cheap stereo that happens to have been stolen.
A case could also be made that the likenesses of the victims could retramatize them, especially if someone knew the connection and continued to produce similar output to taunt them.
It sounds like we should be asking "why is it okay that the people training the models have CSAM?" It's not like it's legal to have, let alone distribute in your for-profit tool.
If you crawl any sufficiently large public collection of images you are bound to download some CSAM images by accident.
Filtering out any images of beaten up naked 7 year olds is certainly something you should do. But if you go by the US legal definition of "any visual depiction of sexually explicit conduct involving a minor (someone under 18 years of age)" you are going to have a really hard time filtering all of that automatically. People don't suddenly look differently when they turn 18, and "sexually explicit" is a wide net open to interpretation.
Read the sentence again. It doesn't claim the data set has CSAM but that it depicts victims. It also assumes that you need AI to see an example to draw it on demand which isn't true.
You probably have a point and I am not sure that these people know how image generation actually works.
But regardless of a likely erroneous legal definition, it seems obvious that there needs to be a law in order to protect children. Because you can't tell.
Just like there should be a law against abusing robots that look like extremely lifelike children in the future when that is possible. Or any kind of abuse of adult lifelike robots either.
Because the behavior is too similar and it's too hard to tell the difference between real and imagined. So allowing the imaginary will lead to more of the real, sometimes without the person even knowing.
AI-generated "CSAM" is the perfect form of kompromat. Any computer with a GPU can generate images that an American judge can find unpalatable. Once tarred by the sex offender brush and cooled by 20+ years in prison for possession, any individual will be effectively destroyed. Of course, no real children are being abused, which makes it all the more ludicrous.
You could say the same thing about real CSAM. Authorities claim you have it, present a hard drive they "recovered" from your property to court and you get convicted.
At some level we just have to hope, and be skeptical of etc, that the government is basically staffed by mostly trustworthy people.
But abuse is a brutally heavy topic, mere technicalities aren't ever going to be strong enough to support the weight put upon them.
That said: I do believe there are counter arguments to be made. I question the ethics and actions of people who leverage the pain of injured children to expand gov reach and power.
Having been a child who can check all the abuse boxes, it gets old watching the endless parade of interests try to mine that pain for their own ends.
Between the 3D printed weapons and the AI CSAM, this year is already shaping up to be wild in terms of misuses of technology. I suppose that’s one downside of adoption.
Last I heard, depending on local attitudes, potentially jail. For that matter, minors can be charged for producing images of themselves. The CSAM laws in the US tend not to draw distinctions between first- and third-party production:
Depends on where you are. In some places in the world, into the gulag with them.
In fact, they can get gulaged if they draw a picture of a totally imaginary 16 year old, let alone a real person. It's kind of in dispute in the US, but that'd be the way to bet. 'Course, in a lot of US states, they're also in trouble for having a "partner" at all.
In practice, they'd probably have to distribute the picture somehow to draw the attention to get them arrested, and anyway they'd be a low priority compared to people producing, distributing, or even consuming, you know, real child porn... but if the right official decided to make an example of them, they'd be hosed.
I mean there have already been people reported to police or having all accounts cancelled for the kind of images most families have of their children growing up.
This entirely ignores what happens when you have states classifying telling a child “it’s ok to be gay/trans” as child abuse, or even just being gay/trans as a sex crime - which plenty of states in the US have said that they want to do.
Typically the same states and people that actively support child abuse by banning actual sex ed, and normalizing child molestation.
Be interesting to see how this pans out in terms of the 1st amendment. Without a victim, it would be interesting to see how the courts rule. They could say its inherently unconstitutional but for sake of the general public, it is fine. This would be similar to the supreme court ruling on DUI checkpoints.
I think the victim is "the state". The law seems to say that by creating a model using CSAM, certain outputs are CSAM, and the law can say whatever it wants to some extent; you just have to convince the Supreme Court that you're right.
The Supreme Court ruled already that there does not need to be a victim, or even any real people at all in its justification to permit refusal of service to lgbt people.
So I’m unsure why even if there were no victims that would be relevant.
To me the problem here is they might identify someone with a problem, but then send them to jail with essentially the same label as an actual pedofile or rapist, and prisons in the US exist as a source of slave labor and future criminals rather than any kind of rehab. So person goes in who is already clearly fucked up (not necessarily this case, assume some case where it’s clearly be demonstrated guilt or whatever) and then comes out with a pile of trauma and no employment prospects and it seems like a sure fire way to create an actual dangerous pedo/abuser.
I think a better equivalence would be the treatment of alcohol - alcoholics don’t go to jail immediately, not even when driving, it requires them failing to get the alcoholism treated, or actually harming people for them to end up in jail.
If it's AI-generated, it is fundamentally not CSAM.
The reason we shifted to the terminology "CSAM", away from "child pornography", is specifically to indicate that it is Child Sexual Abuse Material: that is, an actual child was sexually abused to make it.
You can call it child porn if you really want, but do not call something that never involved the abuse of a real, living, flesh-and-blood child "CSAM". (Or "CSEM"—"Exploitation" rather than "Abuse"—which is used in some circles.) This includes drawings, CG animations, written descriptions, videos where such acts are simulated with a consenting (or, tbh, non consenting—it can be horrific, illegal, and unquestionably sexual assault without being CSAM) adult, as well as anything AI-generated.
These kinds of distinctions in terminology are important, and yes I will die on this hill.
This is where my technical knowledge of genAI breaks down, but wouldn't an image generator be unable to produce such imagery unless honest-to-god CSAM were used in the training of it?
It's possible for the model to take disparate concepts and put them together. E.g. you can train a LORA to teach stable diffusion what a cowboy hat it is, then ask for Dracula in a cowboy hat.that probably doesn't exist in it's training data, but it will give it to you just fine. I'm not about to try, but I would assume the same would apply for child pornography.
In British Columbia both text-based accounts (real and fictional, such as stories) and drawings of underage sexual activity are illegal (basically any sort of depiction, even if it just comes out of your mouth.)
All of Canada. The Canadian Criminal Code is federal.
I think they did carve out a judicial exception in a case where some guy was writing pure text stories for his own personal use, and didn't intentionally show them to anybody else at all, but I also seem to recall it was a pretty grudging exception for only those very specific circumstances.
Specifically, this ruling does not make that kind of content illegal. This person was convicted under federal obscenity statues, which are....fuzzy to say the least. As Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart said, it's a "i know it when i see it" thing.
Which in effect is basically a "you can go to jail if we think you're too gross" law.
> "The creation of CSAM using AI is inherently harmful to children because the machine-learning models utilized by AI have been trained on datasets containing thousands of depictions of known CSAM victims," it says, "revictimizing these real children by using their likeness to generate AI CSAM images into perpetuity."
The word "inherently" there seems like a big stretch to me. I see how it could be harmful to them, but I also see an argument for how such AI generated material is a substitute for the actual CSAM. Has this actually been studied, or is it a taboo topic for policy research?
There's a legally challengable assertion there; "trained on CSAM images".
I imagine an AI image generation model could be readily trained on images of adult soldiers at war and images of children from instagram and then be used to generate imagery of children at war.
I have zero interest in defending exploitation of children, the assertion that children had to have been exploited in order to create images of children engaged in adult activities seems shaky. *
* FWiW I'm sure there are AI models out there that were trained on actual real world CSAM .. it's the implied neccessity that's being questioned here.
It is known that the LAION dataset underpinning foundation models like Stable Diffusion contained at least a few thousand instances of real-life CSAM at one point. I think you would be hard-pressed to prove that any model trained on internet scrapes definitively wasn't trained on any CSAM whatsoever.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/20/24009418/generative-ai-i...
> I think you would be hard-pressed to prove that any model trained on internet scrapes definitively wasn't trained on any CSAM whatsoever.
I'd be hard pressed to prove that you definitely hadn't killed anybody ever.
Legally if it's asserted that these images are criminal because they are the result of being the product of an LLM trained on sources that contained CSAM then the requirement would be to prove that assertion.
With text and speech you could prompt the model to exactly reproduce a Sarah Silverman monologue and assert that proves her content was used in the training set, etc.
Here the defense would ask the prosecution to demonstrate how to extract a copy of original CSAM.
But your point is well taken, it's likely most image generation programs of this nature have been fed at least one image that was borderline jailbait and likely at least one that was well below the line.
> Legally if it's asserted that these images are criminal because they are the result of being the product of an LLM trained on sources that contained CSAM then the requirement would be to prove that assertion.
Legally, possession of CSAM is against the law because there is an assumption that possession proves contribution to market demand, with an understanding that demand incentives production of supply, meaning there that with demand children will be harmed again to produce more content to satisfy the demand. In other words, the intent is to stop future harm. This is why people have been prosecuted for things like suggestive cartoons that have no real-life events behind them. It is not illegal on the grounds of past events. The actual abuse is illegal on its own standing.
The provenance of the imagery is irrelevant. What you need to prove is that your desire to have such imagery won't stimulate yourself or others to create new content with real people. If you could somehow prove that LLM content will satisfy all future thirst, problem solved! That would be world changing.
Framing it in that way is essentially a get out of jail free card - anyone caught with CSAM can claim it was AI generated by a "clean" model, and how would the prosecution ever be able to prove that it wasn't?
I get where you are coming from but it doesn't seem actionable in any way that doesn't effectively legalize CSAM possession, so I think courts will have no choice but to put the burden of proof on the accused. If you play with fire then you'd better have the receipts.
This seems like a long way of saying “guilty until proven innocent”.
It is, but that's hardly unprecedented for this type of thing. In commercial porn the legal burden is on the producer to prove that their models were adults, not for prosecutors to prove that they were minors.
Then all image generation models should be considered inherently harmful, no?
I think you'd be hard-pressed to prove that a few thousand images (out of over 5 billion in the case of that particular data set) had any meaningful effect on the final model capabilities.
> There's a legally challengable assertion there; "trained on CSAM images".
"Legally challengable" only in a pretty tenuous sense that's unlikely to ever haven any actual impact.
That'll be something that's recited as a legislative finding. It's not an element of the offense; nobody has to prove that "on this specific occasion the model was trained in this or that way".
It could theoretically have some impact on a challenge to the constitutionality of the law... but only under pretty unlikely circumstances. First you'd have to get past the presumption that the legislature can make any law it likes regardless of whether it's right about the facts (which, in the US, probably means you have to get courts to take the law under strict scrutiny, which they hate to do). Then you have to prove that that factual claim was actually a critical reason for passing the law, and not just a random aside. Then you have to prove that it's actually false, overcoming a presumption that the legislature properly studied the issue. Then maybe it matters.
I may have the exact structure of that a bit wrong, but that's the flavor of how these things play out.
My comment was in response to a portion of the comment above:
> because the machine-learning models utilized by AI have been trained on datasets containing thousands of depictions of known CSAM victims
I'd argue that CSAM imagery falls into two broad categories; actual real photographic image of actual real abuse and generated images (paintings, drawings, animations, etc) and all generated images are more or less equally bad.
There's a peer link in this larger thread ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_status_of_fictional_porn... ) that indicates at least two US citizen have been charged and sentenced for 20 and 40 years imprisonment each for the possession and distribution of "fictional" child abuse (animated and still japanese cartoon anime, etc).
So, in the wider world, it's a moot point whether these specific images came from training on actual abuse images or not, they depict abuse and that's legally sufficient in the US (apparently), further the same depictions could be generated with or without actual real abuse images and as equivilant images either way they'd be equally offensive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relationship_between_child_por... is a good starting link on this. When i last checked, there were maybe 5 studies total (imagine how hard it is to get those approved by the ethics committees), all of which found different results, some totally the opposite of each other.
Then again, it already seems clear that violent video games do not cause violence, and access to pornography does not increase sexual violence, so this case being the opposite would be unusual.
The word "revictimizing" seems like an even bigger stretch. Assuming the output images don't actually look like them personally (and they won't), how exactly are they more victimized than anybody else in the training data? Those other people's likenesses are also "being used to generate AI CSAM images into perpetuity"... in a sort of attenuated way that's hard to even find if you're not desperately trying to come up with something.
The cold fact is that people want to outlaw this stuff because they find it icky. Since they know it's not socially acceptable (quite yet) to say that, they tend to cast about wildly until they find something to say that sort of sounds like somebody is actually harmed. They don't think critically about it once they land on a "justification". You're not supposed to think critically about it either.
I always found these arguments to be contrived especially when it's already well-known that in the tradition of every Western government, there is no actual imperative for every crime to be linked directly to a victim. It's a far better argument to me, to suggest that the societal utility in using the material to identify and remove paedophiles before they have an actual victim far exceeds the utility of any sort of "freedom" to such material.
If only the same logic had applied to Trump.
Benefiting from illegal acts is also a crime, even if indirect. Like getting a cheap stereo that happens to have been stolen.
A case could also be made that the likenesses of the victims could retramatize them, especially if someone knew the connection and continued to produce similar output to taunt them.
It sounds like we should be asking "why is it okay that the people training the models have CSAM?" It's not like it's legal to have, let alone distribute in your for-profit tool.
If you crawl any sufficiently large public collection of images you are bound to download some CSAM images by accident.
Filtering out any images of beaten up naked 7 year olds is certainly something you should do. But if you go by the US legal definition of "any visual depiction of sexually explicit conduct involving a minor (someone under 18 years of age)" you are going to have a really hard time filtering all of that automatically. People don't suddenly look differently when they turn 18, and "sexually explicit" is a wide net open to interpretation.
Read the sentence again. It doesn't claim the data set has CSAM but that it depicts victims. It also assumes that you need AI to see an example to draw it on demand which isn't true.
Yeah. I don’t like it, but I can see this getting overturned.
You probably have a point and I am not sure that these people know how image generation actually works.
But regardless of a likely erroneous legal definition, it seems obvious that there needs to be a law in order to protect children. Because you can't tell.
Just like there should be a law against abusing robots that look like extremely lifelike children in the future when that is possible. Or any kind of abuse of adult lifelike robots either.
Because the behavior is too similar and it's too hard to tell the difference between real and imagined. So allowing the imaginary will lead to more of the real, sometimes without the person even knowing.
AI-generated "CSAM" is the perfect form of kompromat. Any computer with a GPU can generate images that an American judge can find unpalatable. Once tarred by the sex offender brush and cooled by 20+ years in prison for possession, any individual will be effectively destroyed. Of course, no real children are being abused, which makes it all the more ludicrous.
You could say the same thing about real CSAM. Authorities claim you have it, present a hard drive they "recovered" from your property to court and you get convicted.
At some level we just have to hope, and be skeptical of etc, that the government is basically staffed by mostly trustworthy people.
>> Of course, no real children are being abused,
> You could say the same thing about real CSAM.
Maybe this is trying to make a technical point.
But abuse is a brutally heavy topic, mere technicalities aren't ever going to be strong enough to support the weight put upon them.
That said: I do believe there are counter arguments to be made. I question the ethics and actions of people who leverage the pain of injured children to expand gov reach and power.
Having been a child who can check all the abuse boxes, it gets old watching the endless parade of interests try to mine that pain for their own ends.
Between the 3D printed weapons and the AI CSAM, this year is already shaping up to be wild in terms of misuses of technology. I suppose that’s one downside of adoption.
The main "3D printed weapons" scare was years ago. The current thing is just a blip.
How are 3D printed weapons a misuse?
I believe the parent poster was referring to recent efforts in New York State to require licensure and background checks to purchase a 3D printer [1]
[1] https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2025/A2228
Question for anyone that knows, but what happens if a 16 year old draws a naked picture of their 16 year old partner?
Last I heard, depending on local attitudes, potentially jail. For that matter, minors can be charged for producing images of themselves. The CSAM laws in the US tend not to draw distinctions between first- and third-party production:
https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/blurring...
https://www.innocentlivesfoundation.org/threat-of-sg-csam/
https://www.findlaw.com/criminal/criminal-charges/child-porn...
Depends on where you are. In some places in the world, into the gulag with them.
In fact, they can get gulaged if they draw a picture of a totally imaginary 16 year old, let alone a real person. It's kind of in dispute in the US, but that'd be the way to bet. 'Course, in a lot of US states, they're also in trouble for having a "partner" at all.
In practice, they'd probably have to distribute the picture somehow to draw the attention to get them arrested, and anyway they'd be a low priority compared to people producing, distributing, or even consuming, you know, real child porn... but if the right official decided to make an example of them, they'd be hosed.
I mean there have already been people reported to police or having all accounts cancelled for the kind of images most families have of their children growing up.
This entirely ignores what happens when you have states classifying telling a child “it’s ok to be gay/trans” as child abuse, or even just being gay/trans as a sex crime - which plenty of states in the US have said that they want to do.
Typically the same states and people that actively support child abuse by banning actual sex ed, and normalizing child molestation.
Be interesting to see how this pans out in terms of the 1st amendment. Without a victim, it would be interesting to see how the courts rule. They could say its inherently unconstitutional but for sake of the general public, it is fine. This would be similar to the supreme court ruling on DUI checkpoints.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_status_of_fictional_porn... comments a little on this and suggests that some of the existing laws have been tested in court already.
Still, it's probably better not to be involve in a case like United States vs. $YOU and then have your name appear in this Wikipedia article.
I think the victim is "the state". The law seems to say that by creating a model using CSAM, certain outputs are CSAM, and the law can say whatever it wants to some extent; you just have to convince the Supreme Court that you're right.
The Supreme Court ruled already that there does not need to be a victim, or even any real people at all in its justification to permit refusal of service to lgbt people.
So I’m unsure why even if there were no victims that would be relevant.
To me the problem here is they might identify someone with a problem, but then send them to jail with essentially the same label as an actual pedofile or rapist, and prisons in the US exist as a source of slave labor and future criminals rather than any kind of rehab. So person goes in who is already clearly fucked up (not necessarily this case, assume some case where it’s clearly be demonstrated guilt or whatever) and then comes out with a pile of trauma and no employment prospects and it seems like a sure fire way to create an actual dangerous pedo/abuser.
I think a better equivalence would be the treatment of alcohol - alcoholics don’t go to jail immediately, not even when driving, it requires them failing to get the alcoholism treated, or actually harming people for them to end up in jail.
If it's AI-generated, it is fundamentally not CSAM.
The reason we shifted to the terminology "CSAM", away from "child pornography", is specifically to indicate that it is Child Sexual Abuse Material: that is, an actual child was sexually abused to make it.
You can call it child porn if you really want, but do not call something that never involved the abuse of a real, living, flesh-and-blood child "CSAM". (Or "CSEM"—"Exploitation" rather than "Abuse"—which is used in some circles.) This includes drawings, CG animations, written descriptions, videos where such acts are simulated with a consenting (or, tbh, non consenting—it can be horrific, illegal, and unquestionably sexual assault without being CSAM) adult, as well as anything AI-generated.
These kinds of distinctions in terminology are important, and yes I will die on this hill.
This is where my technical knowledge of genAI breaks down, but wouldn't an image generator be unable to produce such imagery unless honest-to-god CSAM were used in the training of it?
It's possible for the model to take disparate concepts and put them together. E.g. you can train a LORA to teach stable diffusion what a cowboy hat it is, then ask for Dracula in a cowboy hat.that probably doesn't exist in it's training data, but it will give it to you just fine. I'm not about to try, but I would assume the same would apply for child pornography.
Seems fine.
Right? Hard to be mad about the outcome.
In British Columbia both text-based accounts (real and fictional, such as stories) and drawings of underage sexual activity are illegal (basically any sort of depiction, even if it just comes out of your mouth.)
So California is just starting to catch up.
All of Canada. The Canadian Criminal Code is federal.
I think they did carve out a judicial exception in a case where some guy was writing pure text stories for his own personal use, and didn't intentionally show them to anybody else at all, but I also seem to recall it was a pretty grudging exception for only those very specific circumstances.
Wrong country (at least for now...!)
Not wrong country. In 2021, a Texas man was sentenced to 40 years in federal prison over CSAM text and drawings - https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/texas-man-sentenced-40-years-...
Specifically, this ruling does not make that kind of content illegal. This person was convicted under federal obscenity statues, which are....fuzzy to say the least. As Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart said, it's a "i know it when i see it" thing.
Which in effect is basically a "you can go to jail if we think you're too gross" law.